But Diana Petramala, economist for TD Economics, points out the two numbers aren’t comparable. And if you adjust to make them comparable, Canada’s household debt levels are nowhere close to the U.S. peak.

Making the two comparable requires a few adjustments to both sets of data. First, Statistics Canada removes interest payments on non-mortgage debt from disposable income, while the U.S. data does not. Thus, adding it back into the Canadian data lowers Canadian indebtedness right off the bat.

The Canadian data also excludes nonprofit institutions, something included in the U.S. data. While Ms. Petramala prefers to exclude this data altogether, she can’t remove it from the U.S. set, because separate data is not available. So the alternative is to add nonprofits to the Canadian data — leading again to lower indebtedness. (Nonprofits tend to be less indebted than households or unincorporated businesses.)

Finally, a big factor that also needs to be considered is healthcare spending. Canadians pay more tax, so they have less disposable income left after the fact. But the discrepancies between the U.S. and Canada narrow if factoring in health costs. In the U.S., more health costs are paid directly out of consumer pockets. Accounting for that, and the cost of private healthcare insurance plans, Ms. Petramala found that 8% of disposable income in U.S. households go toward out-of-pocket healthcare expenses — twice the level of that in Canada.